mIRC is one of the best chat programs on the market these days. It uses megabytes of ram at most for hundreds of channels. It's a modern technology miracle and I wish more people used it.

I haven't used IRC in years, but when I started out with IRC/MSN Chat in 2001ish it was using mIRC. That piece of software can basically answer for my becoming a developer and the career I've had over the last 20 odd years.

Long ago I installed dozens of irc clients, joined a few dozen servers, a few hundred channels. Most didn't do well. Then there was kvirc that just sat there at 0% CPU no matter what I did.

Back when I was maintaining an IRC client, my go-to stress test was to hop on Wikipedia's IRC network, where they have a bunch of firehose channels showing edits to Wikipedia stream by in realtime. Both super high load and occasionally edifying :)

> Long ago I installed dozens of irc clients, joined a few dozen servers, a few hundred channels

Maybe mIRC got bloated as of late, but my shitty Windows XP computer could easily handle multiple networks and 50-ish channels per network back in early 2000s, could it really have gotten so much worse since then?

I don't actually remember how good or bad mirc was. It was the most popular client at the time but lacked things I don't really remember, it was time to move on. I tried Quassel which was nice but it got slow as the logs grew. Then i tried a lot of clients.

I bought a mIRC licence after I got my first job, one of the beat shareware apps!

I used irssi for many years before switching to Weechat, and I can't imagine ever switching back.

I use Quassel because it's a so-called "split" client, where "quassel core" runs on a VPS, and then I can run actual clients of the quassel core on several different devices, including Quasseldroid on Android. It's a much better experience than sshing into a screen session.

Quassel is basically self hosted irccloud, I use it on 5 computers, Windows, Linux and Android, it's great